Corpus Christmas

by Margaret Maron

“Maybe. But I can’t see him standing up again after getting this wound, so how’d blood run straight down his neck?”

  They would keep it in mind, Sigrid told him as Guidry photographed the stain.

  The dumbwaiter shaft had been discovered and a good set of prints were found on the enamelled wood molding that framed the hinged doors. Officer Monte had managed to keep everyone off the back stairs, so Albee started down to determine the dumbwaiter’s current location, being careful to keep to the center of the treads and on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary.

  Cohen finished his preliminary examination and stripped off thin latex gloves as he stood. “Funny-looking guy, isn’t he? Little Ed with the big head. Something odd about that head.”

  “Besides its size?” asked Lowry, who had chalked an outline of the body’s position before Cohen began.

  “Not our old friend the blunt instrument?” queried Bernie Peters.

  “I’ll let you know after I’ve taken a look at that wound in the lab,” Cohen told them.

  Guidry stepped back in for more pictures now that Cohen had turned the body face up.

  “Want to estimate a time of death?” Sigrid asked. Cohen shrugged. “Rigor’s complete, but there’s still a little body warmth, so we’re talking maybe twelve to fifteen hours, no more than sixteen hours max.”

  They looked at their watches. Between 7:15 and 11:15, always taking into account that the temperature in this hallway may have been measurably higher or lower than it was now, or that the dead man had some physical quirk that would quicken or retard rigor mortis.

  “I saw him alive between eight and eight-thirty last night,” Sigrid said.

  Bernie Peters shot Lowry a telling glance. The lieutenant had a reputation for coldness, but she hadn’t turned a hair upon seeing the body. Even Cohen looked at her curiously. “Friend of yours?”

  “No,” she answered distantly. “There was a party here last night and he came, too. We met briefly and he left early. Or rather he went upstairs early. I believe he was doing research on some papers in the attic.”

  Elaine Albee reappeared on the back stairs. “The dumbwaiter’s on the first floor,” she reported, slightly out of breath. “And there looks like a smear of blood inside.”

  “Probably turn out to be roast beef,” Cohen grinned. “You guys ready for me to take him?”

  Sigrid queried her people. Guidry was satisfied with the number of photographs she’d taken and Lowry and Peters had just finished with their inventory of Roger Shambley’s pockets, so everyone stood back as Cohen’s assistants lifted the body onto a collapsible gurney, covered it, and strapped it down. Rigor mortis made for a bulky shape and Sigrid was not the only one reminded of a grotesque and badly wrapped Christmas package.

  “By the way, Lieutenant—” Cohen paused before following the body downstairs. “You’ll get my official report late this afternoon, but I can put it in an eyedropper right now: On the bones last week, you can forget about actual age, sex, race—hell! I couldn’t even swear they aren’t monkey bones. All I can say is that they’re consistent with what you’d find if a newborn baby was wrapped in newspapers and stuck in a trunk for thirty years, give or take a week.”

  “What about the mummified one?” Sigrid asked. “Caucasian girl,” he replied promptly. “And before you ask, yeah, she was born alive. I found lint in her breathing passages. Looks like she no sooner got herself born than she got herself smothered.”

  With a laconic “Ciao for now, amici,” he trailed after the gurney, never realizing that he’d allowed Roger Shambley one final exit in Italian.

  With the body removed from the landing, Sigrid went up the steep attic stairs to examine the makeshift office Roger Shambley had created amid file cabinets and storage boxes. Later, someone would go through the papers and folders so neatly stacked upon his work tables, but for now she simply wished to sit in the art historian’s chair and try to get a better feel for the man she’d met so briefly last night, some sense of why he’d died.

  The tabletop directly in front of his chair was bare, so she assumed he’d probably finished work for the night and cleared away his papers. Into one of those folders, perhaps. Or into his briefcase, which still sat beside the chair. A methodical man?

  She rather thought there had been method in Shambley’s calculated insults last night—to that trustee, Mr. Reinicke, to Søren Thorvaldsen and, by extension, to Nauman and Francesca Leeds—but she’d observed him too briefly to understand the motive for his rudeness. There had been a certain electricity in his manner, though; as if he were so wired about something that he hardly knew or cared what he was saying.

  Or to whom.

  Power, Sigrid thought. Shambley had acted like someone who’d just won a lottery or inherited a throne and suddenly felt free to ride roughshod over everyone else.

  “Lieutenant?” Jim Lowry’s voice at the attic door drew her back to the present. “We think we’ve found where he died.”

  They went down the narrow back stairs, past the butler’s pantry on the first floor where Officer Guidry had photographed the dumbwaiter before the crime scene technicians took a sample of its stains for the lab, and from the butler’s pantry, on down the broader, more commodious stairway to the basement.

  As they descended, Sigrid noted and carefully sidestepped three chalk-circled spots.

  At the foot of the steps, a portable floodlamp lit up the area and made it quite apparent that the floor there had been recently—and inexpertly—mopped. They could clearly see a circular spot where dried streaks of water left dull swirls upon the shiny dark tiles.

  “Bonded commercial cleaners come in every Monday,” said Elaine Albee as they watched a technician fill small glass vials with samples of a brown sticky substance he’d scraped from the joints between the tiles. “According to the woman who found the body, the cleaners bring their own equipment and part of their routine is to wax and buff the floors down here.”

  A mop, still damp, had been found in the scullery, she told Sigrid. It, too, would be taken to the lab for analysis.

  “And the blood on the stairs themselves?” Sigrid asked, referring to those chalk circles.

  “Couple of small splashes up on the tenth and eleventh treads; a bigger one down here on the third,” said Bernie Peters. “Nothing on the upper landing and, from the shape of the drops, he was moving down at the time.”

  It was consistent with what Cohen had told them. Until they uncovered data to disprove it, their working theory would be that Shambley had started down the basement steps when he was struck a tremendous blow on the head from behind. He had fallen here, bled copiously, then his body had been hauled up to the third floor soon afterwards.

  “Why not leave him here in the basement where he fell?” Sigrid wondered aloud.

  “The perpetrator wanted him found quickly?” speculated Lowry, “Maybe he didn’t want him found quickly,” Albee countered. “There’s a live-in janitor who has a room down here. Maybe the perp wanted time to get away and set up an alibi before the janitor stumbled over him.”

  “Or maybe it was an individual that just didn’t want us taking too close a look at the basement,” suggested Peters.

  “In which case,” said Sigrid.

  The others tried not to groan as they looked across the crowded Victorian kitchen to the warren of storage rooms beyond.

  “There’s still a bunch of uniforms wandering around upstairs,” Mick Cluett reminded her.

  “Might as well put them to use,” Sigrid agreed. “And start a canvass of the square, anyone seen entering or leaving these premises last night. In the meantime, Lowry, you and I will begin with the staff.”

  They commandeered the stately, book-lined library for questioning their witnesses and lunchtime came and went before the two police detectives had heard all that the Breul House staff were prepared to tell them.

  With commendable initiative, the secretary, Hope Ruffton, had typed up a guest list from the previous ev
ening, complete with addresses, which helped them track departures. Sigrid knew that the three trustees and their respective spouses had left shortly after eight, and that she and Nauman left at 8:20. After that, as best the others could reconstruct, the curator, Elliott Buntrock, said good-night at 8:30, followed soon by Søren Thorvaldsen and Lady Francesca Leeds, Hope Ruffton, Hester Kohn, and Jacob Munson, in that order.

  Hope Ruffton had been collected by three friends for a musical comedy playing up in Harlem and she supplied the detectives with a separate list of her friends’ names and addresses.

  Benjamin Peake declared that he’d planned to wait until the caterer’s men had gone, but Mrs. Beardsley, the senior docent, had volunteered to stay in the director’s place since she had only to walk across the square after she’d locked up.

  “Mr. Peake left about eight-forty,” Mrs. Beardsley told them. “The caterers were finished shortly before nine; then I double-checked to make sure no candles were still burning, turned out the lights, and went home shortly after nine.”

  “All the lights?” Sigrid asked. “What about Dr. Shambley?”

  “I refer, of course, to the main lights,” Mrs. Beardsley replied, sitting so erectly in the maroon leather wing chair that Sigrid was reminded of one of Grandmother Lattimore’s favorite dicta: a lady’s spine never touches the back of her chair. “The security lights are on an automatic timer and they provide enough illumination for finding one’s way through the house.”

  “And you didn’t see Dr. Shambley after the party last night?”

  “No. Dr. Shambley often worked late,” said the docent with a slight air of disapproval.

  “What about the janitor?”

  “Pascal Grant had permission to attend a movie. I assume he hadn’t yet returned by the time I left.”

  “Permission?”

  “When you speak to Pascal, Lieutenant Harald, I think it will be evident why we give him more guidance and direction than an ordinary worker. This is his first job since he left the shelter and I do hope you’ll be patient with him. He’s really quite capable within clearly defined limits. You’ll see.”

  “So as far as you know, Dr. Shambley was alone in the house when you left?”

  “Y-es,” she said, but something unspoken lingered indecisively on her face.

  Pressed, Mrs. Beardsley described how she’d awakened at midnight and seen Mr. Thorvaldsen descending the front steps of the Breul House.

  Sigrid went to the library window and asked Mrs. Beardsley to point out her house across the square. It was a windy gray day and the reporters who crowded around below to question the police guard outside had bright pink cheeks and blown hair. “You’re positive it was Thorvaldsen?”

  “Absolutely,” the lady said firmly. “He’s quite tall and when he passed under a streetlight at the corner, I saw his fair hair.”

  On his identity, Mrs. Beardsley could not be budged, although she was quick to admit that she hadn’t actually seen the Dane exit from the house. “I thought perhaps he might have returned for something he lost or else forgot and left behind.”

  “Who has keys to this place?” asked Lowry from his place at the end of a polished wooden library table.

  “All the trustees have keys.” Mrs. Beardsley patted her purse with a proprietary air. “I, too, of course, as senior docent.”

  Seated across the table from her, Sigrid looked at the growing list of names on her notepad. “Thorvaldsen, as well?”

  “Oh, no, he’s not a trustee. But Lady Francesca might since she’s going to be in and out a lot if Mr. Nauman’s retrospective takes place.” She gave Sigrid a friendly social smile and began to describe how surprised everyone was to discover that last night’s Miss Harald was today’s Lieutenant Harald.

  Jim Lowry was diverted by these clues to the lieutenant’s off-duty life. Odd to be taking down her testimony as background for a case. Oscar Nauman’s name rang a vague bell, but he couldn’t quite recall why. Besides, wasn’t she supposed to be living with an oddball writer named Roman Tramegra? Maybe Lainey would know.

  The lieutenant’s cold gaze fell on him and he started guiltily. “Um—keys,” he croaked. “Who else has them? The janitor?”

  “Oh yes. Not to the main door, but to an outside door in the basement.” The gray-haired woman hesitated. “And Miss Ruffton and Dr. Peake, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  * * *

  Miss Ruffton shared with them her impression that Dr. Shambley had been up to something besides pure disinterested research, but did not suggest what that something might be.

  Dr. Peake grew defensive, mistook their questions for innuendoes, and wound up revealing more animosity toward Dr. Shambley than he’d intended.

  “A busybody and a snoop,” declared Peake. “With delusions of mental superiority and the reverse snobbism of the proletariat.”

  “Really?” Sigrid asked, not having heard that epithet since her college days.

  “Proletarian roots compounded by his shortness,” Peake theorized. “He always insulted his superiors.”

  Sigrid thought of last night. “At the party, he was rude to Mr. Reinicke, Mr. Thorvaldsen, and Professor Nauman.

  “Well, there you are.” Peake nodded. “They’re all much taller.”

  When it was his turn to be questioned, Pascal Grant sat in one of the heavy library chairs with his ankles crossed like a schoolboy and kept his head down when spoken to. The janitor was so uncommunicative that Sigrid at first wondered if the young man fully understood what had happened to Shambley, and she and Lowry found themselves phrasing their questions in words of one syllable.

  “I didn’t see Dr. Shambley at all last night,” he said, looking up through thick golden lashes as he answered. “Rick and me, we went to the movie.”

  “Rick?”

  “Rick’s my friend,” Grant said softly. “What time did you get back here?” asked Lowry.

  “I don’t know. We listened to tapes, Rick and me. Then Rick went home and I went to bed. I didn’t hear anything.”

  Sigrid looked up from her notes. “Your friend Rick was here?”

  “He went home,” said Grant, darting quick glances a both of them. “He didn’t hear anything either.”

  “Does your friend Rick have a last name?”

  Pascal Grant concentrated a moment and then his face lit up with a beautiful smile. “Evans. His name is Rick Evans. He’s Mr. Munson’s grandson.”

  They could extract no further information. The young handyman continued to insist he and Evans had neither seen, heard, nor spoken to Roger Shambley the previous evening.

  Unfortunately for him, Bernie Peters came up just then to announce that their search had turned up a bloody scatter rug hidden behind some boxes in one of the storerooms, and that a softball bat found beside Pascal Grant’s bed seemed to have a suspicious stain at the business end.

  “Is that how you killed him?” Sigrid asked gently. Young Grant shook his head and tears pooled in his blue eyes. “No, I didn’t. We didn’t see him. We didn’t do it.”

  Feeling rather like the schoolyard bully, Sigrid sighed. “Take him back to headquarters for further questioning,” she told Peters. “And have Rick Evans picked up, too.”

  Mrs. Beardsley was so outraged by Pascal Grant’s removal to headquarters that Sigrid was not overly surprised to reach her office and find the woman had gotten there before her. Nor to see that she had brought along her own lawyer, a thin dry man with tonsured hair and an ascetic manner. Harvey Pruitt might be more at home dealing with wills and deeds and other civil matters, but for Mrs. Gawthrop Wallace Beardsley’s sake, he seemed prepared to represent Pascal Grant, should the young janitor be detained on criminal charges.

  Rick Evans had been located at the Kohn and Munson Gallery, and an equally protective Hester Kohn had accompanied him downtown. Three minutes after their arrival, they were joined by the gallery’s attorney, a tall, brown-haired woman in what looked like Eskimo mukluks, a deer-sk
in parka lined with fur, and gold-rimmed granny glasses. Ms. Caryn DiFranco.

  The two lawyers immediately went into a huddle, then requested and were given a private room in which to confer with their respective clients.

  It was long past lunchtime, so Sigrid and her team took advantage of the lull to send down for sandwiches. Mick Cluett had been sent off to check Shambley’s apartment and to notify his next of kin; but Eberstadt, back from court, joined them with an enormous corned beef on rye.

  “If Frances could see that,” said Bernie Peters, shaking his head.

  “Salads are for summertime,” Eberstadt said defensively. “In December, a man needs something that’ll stick to his ribs.”

  “Just what you need.” Elaine Albee grinned. “More meat on those puny ribs.”

  Eberstadt laughed and as they ate, the others filled him in on Roger Shambley’s death amid such Victorian surroundings.

  They had taken a set of elimination prints from staff members at the house. “Just eyeballing it, I’d say the Grant kid’s the one who left prints on the dumbwaiter,” said Peters.

  “You should see his bedroom down there in that basement,” Jim Lowry told Eberstadt. “Looks like a Chinese whorehouse—red velvet and gold satin, snaky lights, and art posters or calendar pictures on every square inch of wall space.”

  “Calendar pictures?” Eberstadt leered. “Art posters?”

  “Get your mind out of the gutter,” Albee told him. She reached across the table to commandeer his kosher dill pickle. “He’s talking abstract art, not Playboy art.”

  “Yeah, it’s funny,” said Peters. “You’d think a guy like him—not too swift on the uptake—would have pictures that looked like real things.”

  “Probably sees enough of those upstairs,” said Albee. Between crunches of Eberstadt’s pickle, she described for him the tiers of gilt-framed pictures that lined the walls of the main galleries at the Erich Breul House.

  Matt Eberstadt savored the last morsel of corned beef and licked his fingertips. “Frances keeps saying we ought to go tour the place. She likes old things,” he said, wiping his hands on a less than clean handkerchief.